


Little Gold Cross

by like_lions



Series: You Woke The Lion Universe [1]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Background Relationships, Backstory, Canon Backstory, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Origin Story, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:02:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26975575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/like_lions/pseuds/like_lions
Summary: Cat Adams was three years old when her mother gave her a little gold cross. It was meant to keep her safe. Origin fic on Catherine "Cat" Adams.
Series: You Woke The Lion Universe [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1968589
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	1. Copper and Metallic

**Author's Note:**

> TW: child abuse, domestic violence, sexual abuse reference (nothing explicit)
> 
> I wanted to write another fic about Cat specifically before I continued my Cat/Spencer alternate universe story. I think it is important to humanize her by giving her backstory rather than the one-sided view of her we got in the show. The story is technically canon (based on the backstory given in the show), but I've gone into a lot more detail. This is going to be a three part story showing her life ahead of my Cat/Spencer fic You Woke The Lion.

You were three years old when your mother gave you a little gold cross necklace. It wasn’t meant to be a particularly poignant moment. Pretty standard in Puerto Rican households along with getting a baby girl’s ears pierced when she was still in the hospital. But from the day you got it you never took it off because she promised it would protect you, and you believed her. 

You were four years old the first time you saw fear in your mother’s eyes. You had heard the screaming before, but until that point you hadn’t seen her mouth quiver in fear as your father shouted at her about not having dinner ready. The first time you saw him hit her you thought she was dead. She hit her head so hard against the wall in the kitchen that she was unconscious for a brief moment. Your father panicked - a foreboding sign for the future - until she came to and stumbled to her feet. Once his panic subsided you thought he would apologize - that’s what your mother told you to do when you hurt someone, right? But he went right back to screaming about dinner and your mother carried on like nothing had happened.

And that was it - a regular occurrence in the house. Your father would do things and have no consequences. He was a friend of the local police department and they would sweep things under the rug to avoid getting him in trouble when the neighbors called them. He would hit your mom and it would be her fault, because she didn’t clean the house. She didn’t do the laundry. She wasn’t a good enough wife and that’s why he had to do those things. And so you internalized it - your father wasn’t capable of wrongdoing. He was just correcting bad behavior. He wasn’t capable of hurting anyone, your mother would tell you.

So you tried not to think too hard about the nights when he’d stumble into the house, drunk off his ass and creep into your room. He’d curl up under the sheets next to you and you’d shiver under his touch. He’d hush you to stay quiet and you’d freeze in fear. When he was finished you’d hate yourself because you must have done something wrong. He wasn’t capable of hurting anyone, your mother would tell you. You were just four years old.

You were so cut off from the outside world that life inside that tiny, gray, shotgun-style house. The neighbors were a fleeting presence, but you and your mother always shuffled inside quickly to avoid them. Your mother would whisper to you, vamonos, tenemos que guardar los comestibles… and you’d believe that she was just trying to get dinner started as quickly as she should, as to not upset your father. You were only five years old and it never occurred to you that she was hiding the bruises. They became so common that your only memories of her are of her soft light brown skin tinted with purple and blue.

Sometimes you would be afraid to go to sleep - you’d tell your mother that monsters would come out from under your bed. You were too afraid of making her sad by telling her about how papi had to punish you at night. You had seen how she cried all the time - if she wasn’t crying her face was stained with tearmarks or she was quickly washing them away before your father came home. When you’d be too afraid to go to bed, your mami would tell you to say your prayers. That if you kept the lord in your life then you would always be safe from harm. But she wore a little gold cross just like yours and it never kept her safe, so how could it work for you?

Until one night your father came home, slamming the door behind him. And you heard fighting and crashing and crying and yelling. You were too scared to get out of bed. You heard your mami scream and then everything went quiet. It was over now, it was going to be okay. You tried to lie back down and go to sleep, but all you could hear was the screaming replaying over and over again in your head. Your father didn’t come into your room that night.

Blood has a smell to it, you learned the next morning. Coppery, metallic, like if the word slick had a smell. It fills a room when the windows are closed in the middle of a humid spring day. Death has a smell too, but you try not to remember that one. You try not to remember anything you saw that morning. You were six years old and the only thing you can remember from that day was the ringing in your ears. Ringing, ringing, ringing, all resonating from the screams around you. The screams that reminded you of all the times your father would slap you, the screams that beckoned the police to your house, the screams that rubbed your throat raw.

And just like that, it was over. Your happy - if you can call it that - childhood was over and you were being sent away like a pariah. Everyone in town came out to see the tiny, gray, shotgun-style house with yellow caution tape around it. A social worker brought you back there to pick up your belongings to take to your new foster home, but when you arrived you refused to get out of the car. There was nothing for you there, not anymore.


	2. Venom

The first foster home is okay. Nice, even. Your foster father is a nice man with kind brown eyes. He never touches you or hits his wife, the pretty redhead. They have a swingset in the backyard and a dog named Dexter. You are scared to like them, because the last parent you liked was mami and you know what happened to her. But you enjoy it, sitting on their wraparound porch on summer days looking up at the stars. You wonder what your life could have been like if you were able to stay like that forever.

But you learn that nothing is permanent at an early age. The nice man with kind brown eyes may not be a monster like your father, but he wasn’t a nice man anyway. Or at least that’s what you surmise from watching your foster mother crying on the phone to her mother about the woman he’s leaving her for. You wonder if you cursed this family with your presence. The last home you were in ended up broken and abandoned, and soon enough this one did too.

Your next couple of foster homes teach you that monsters aren’t rare. If anything, they are the norm. Men were capable of a particular kind of evil that you could barely comprehend. And that’s not to say that you didn’t get slapped around by your foster mothers, no, that happened quite a bit. But you could never understand what would make a man so twisted that he would ask you to dress in his daughter’s ballet clothes and take you upstairs into the attic. You couldn’t understand what would make him blame you for the “problems” in his marriage when he got caught. And yet it happened, and continued to happen again and again.

You’d hear stories about the foster care system successes. Kids that ended up with great parents, being adopted and smiling in all the brochure photos like they were in a fucking Sears catalog. You’d look at their smiles and wonder if they were telling the truth. Were they really happy? Or were they just faking it? Because people lie, they always did. Maybe it was really just luck of the draw when it came to these families, but if it was you thought you must be the most unlucky girl in the world.

Your social worker told you that you needed to be more personable. More cheerful, she said. You nearly laughed in her face as you replied that you had nothing in your life to be cheerful about. You’d look in the mirror and you’d see yourself maturing into your mother’s face. You should be grateful that you have something to remember her by, your fourth foster mother told you. But all you could remember when you looked at your own reflection was the bruises across her face, the busted lip, and the blood on the sides of her face from where your father desperately tried to keep her alive. Worse, you didn’t just see her, you saw your father in your face too. Your eyes were pools of darkness just like him, and you wondered if he passed along his venom to you too.

You got your first taste of blood when your foster brother tried to stick his hand up your skirt while his parents were out. You bit him on the cheek so hard you drew blood. He screamed and called you crazy, and for a brief moment you saw a look in his eye that was intoxicating. Your foster parents made a quick call to the agency and you were back at CPS, but you didn’t care. You were riding a high.

You’d start walking around your school campus just daring someone to fuck with you. You wanted a reason to fight, a reason to draw blood. You were bloodthirsty and you didn’t know why. You assumed then that it was just the evil that tainted your father coming back to haunt you. It never even occurred to you that you might just be looking for someone to hurt. Somebody had to pay for what had happened - and kept happening - to you. Eventually you were expelled from the local public high school and needed to go to a foster family in a different district, and it was with the Rush family that you found the perfect mark.

\----

Dean Rush was a quintessential all-American dad. He had the wife - Jill - and a younger daughter named Lisa. He coached Lisa’s travel soccer team and was the drummer for the church band. He was a scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts for godssake. But at night he was just like all the others - except this time he crept into his own daughter’s room. You saw it in her eyes the next morning, how she avoided eye contact and flinched under his touch. You told her to tell her mom, but she was afraid too. Apparently Mr. Rush was similar to Mr. Adams in more ways than one and liked to use both Jill and Lisa as punching bags.

Surprisingly, he didn’t mess with you. Maybe he could smell the fearlessness on your breath. Maybe he saw you as damaged goods - no use corrupting what is already corrupted. Regardless, you made a plan that he was going to be the one to pay for the sins of his sex. You hid in Lisa’s room and held a knife tightly in your hand. It slipped and cut you as you stabbed him over and over and over again. It would have been almost poetic copying your father’s fucked up MO and turning it on its head had Lisa not been horrified watching you. You looked into Dean’s eyes that day and saw a familiar look that you quickly became addicted to - pure fear. You looked into Lisa’s eyes and saw something you hated - disgust.

You went to juvenile detention after that, never again would you step foot into a foster family’s home. But you were satisfied - you had succeeded in making sure that Dean Rush, brother of the church of the Lord would never hurt another person again. You had done the world a favor, but how were you repaid? Lisa testified against you and got you sentenced to spend the rest of your adolescence behind bars. Not a thank you in sight. It didn’t matter because you had proven something to yourself that day. No one was ever going to fuck with Cat Adams ever again.


	3. Choices

You were twenty years old when you got out of juvenile detention. You had forced yourself to forget who you used to be. Life inside meant that you had to become someone else and leave your past behind. It was a welcome change. So when you were released and given back your personal effects, it shook you to see the little gold cross sitting in the bin.  


You didn’t put it on, you just held it in your palm and thought about it. Thought about the past - your mami and the life that you were supposed to have. The foster family with the wraparound porch. You thought about Lisa and the way that she looked at you. You didn’t want anything to do with it, so you shoved it into your pocket and went about your business.

Your time inside had strengthened your resolve that you were put on this earth for a reason. All this suffering wasn’t for naught. You were a righter of wrongs. You were a protector. Even if the rest of the world didn’t realize it yet, you were doing them a favor by ridding them of monsters one man at a time. You thought through your plans and jumped right into them after your release. You decided to go with a .45 from now on, though. Much less messy and harder to track back to you. You didn’t want to end up back in a cage, now did you?

Your plan was simple. On the surface you were an hit woman for hire, but when you came across a case of a man trying to do wrong - and they were always trying to do wrong - you knew what to do. You’d look into their eyes and see the lies they spun with the confidence of an Academy Award winner and you’d be enraged. You wanted to crush them, you wanted to see them pay. Wanted to see them suffer. But a simple shot to the head would have to suffice, couldn’t be getting too emotional and sloppy. You would have to get your satisfaction from the sheer number of monsters you were putting down. You kept a running tally until you got to the fifties, then it got a little muddied. All you knew was that you were righteous in your vendetta.

You tried to go to a psychiatrist once. It was after you had a particularly difficult case of a man who wanted his adult daughter murdered before she could testify against him in court proceedings. Before he died he asked you if you had any humanity left, and you laughed. After you put a bullet between his eyes though, you were left wondering. So you went into that psychiatrist’s office with the goal of genuinely understanding yourself better - hiding some key details of course. The formal diagnosis she gave was complex post traumatic stress disorder with psychopathic traits. Somewhere along the way you had built up such aggressively strong defense mechanisms that you became nearly incapable of normal human emotion.

You asked her if that made you a monster. Do you think you’re a monster? You replied honestly that you didn’t really know if you knew what that word meant anymore.

You never went back to see her. Not because she was wrong, but because she was right. And you didn’t want anyone in your head, you couldn’t afford the extra variable. Your life’s plan was already in motion and there was no going back now. Maybe you’d sacrificed your humanity along the way, but you weren’t sure how much of that you had left after your childhood anyway.

You were going in the right direction, you were doing the right thing. It didn’t matter if you got off on it now, it didn’t matter if you enjoyed the thrill that you got from it as long as you were taking out people who deserved it. And if you died young as a result of it - from a bullet in the head or a needle in the arm - you’d be able to stand by your choice.

That’s what you thought, anyway. But just as life always had, you got thrown a curveball in a coffee shop in the middle of the financial district. He was sweet and innocent, and there was something in his spirit that you craved for yourself. Maybe if you were able to get close to him some of his inherent goodness could rub off on you. But then you got in too deep - something you didn’t even know was possible anymore - and now you’re sleeping with an FBI agent, meeting his FBI agent/profiler buddies, and wondering if you made the right choice.

There is no turning back now.

Is there?


End file.
